Current concern about biodiversity change associated with human impacts has raised scientific interest in the role of biodiversity in ecosystem functioning. However, studies on this topic face the challenge of evaluating and separating the relative contributions of biodiversity and environment to ecosystem functioning in natural environments. To investigate this problem, we collected sediment c...

Research on biomarkers as early bioindicators of perturbation in populations and individuals has been gaining ground over the last decade. This ecotoxicological approach relies on the fact that changes occur at low levels of organization before the community is affected and thus they can be monitored to assess environmental safety. Changes may concern behavior, physiology, biochemistry, or geno...

Changes in the coral reef complex can affect predator-prey relationships, resource availability and niche utilisation in the associated fish community, which may be reflected in decreased stability of the functional traits present in a community. This is because particular traits may be favoured by a changing environment, or by habitat degradation. Furthermore, other traits can be selected agai...

background: as a major responsibility, health authorities must control rational prescription of drugs (rud). a way to analyze the regional status of drug prescription is the who’s recommended indices. the purpose of the study was to determine the status of drug prescriptions in pharmacies of healthcare centers under the authority of tehran university of medical sciences based on the who indices...

Over-parameterisation is a key issue in (integrated) environmental modelling. Therefore, a sensitivity analysis (SA) can assist in the proper application of a complex environmental model, such as the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). A very powerful sensitivity analysis technique that is gaining popularity in environmental modelling is the variance-based Sobol’ method. Still, the high numb...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between multivariate process capability indices and loss functions for both nominal-the-best and smaller-the-better cases, so the likelihood and consequences resulting from the nonconforming of a manufacturing process or an environmental system can be evaluated simultaneously. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, the aut...

The argument that stringent environmental regulations are generally thought to harm export flows is crucial when determining policy recommendations related to environmental preservation and international competitiveness. By using bilateral trade data, we examine the relationships between trade flows and various environmental stringency indices. Previous studies have used energy intensity, abate...

We suggest an alternative way to construct a family of indices of socioeconomic inequality of health. Our indices belong to the broad category of linear indices. In contrast to rank-dependent indices, which are defined in terms of the ranks of the socioeconomic variable and the levels of the health variable, our indices are based on the levels of both the socioeconomic and the health variable. ...

one of the innovations of councils law is the assignment of an executive officer is responsible of implementing legislations of islamic council of the village. the performances of assistants we classified in three classes of social, economical and environmental- structural indices. the objective of the current research is to evaluate the indices effective on the performance levels of village as...

The rapid industrial development that began in the 1950's created environmental problems which consequently led to health hazards among residents of heavily polluted areas in Japan, such as Minamata Disease and Yokkaichi Asthma. Faced with these situations, the Japanese national government and local environmental authorities exerted much efforts to control pollution as well as to provide soluti...